The Quest for a Child of One’s Own: Parents, Markets and Transnational Adoption
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transnational adoption is currently at its peak. The direction of these adoptions is from south to north and from east to west. Scrutiny of previous research shows that there is a discrepancy between the supply and demand of children for adoption. While there are millions of orphans and children in the world needing homes, Western adoptive parents queue for what are considered to be ‘adoptable’ children. Drawing on 15 thematic interviews with Finnish adoptive parents this article considers the reasons behind the recent trend to adopt from abroad, and how parental preferences are formed in individual families. It is shown that adopting is primarily connected to family formation, and is linked to a powerful desire to experience parenthood. Parental preferences are a function of the changing demands and expectations of parenting in general in the West. Adoption from abroad just provides a new way of fulfilling these expectations. The ideal child is a healthy female infant of European or Asian origin that allows the adoptive parents to fulfil and perform their ideal parental roles. On the global level parents’ hopes and anxieties result in the stratification of children in transnational adoption by age, skin colour, health and gender, further escalating the discrepancy between demand and supply.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".